Politics, Nature, and the Imagination in the Work of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, University of California-Berkeley
Geballe Room, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 220 Stephens Hall
Saturday, March 15, 2014, 9:00 am –5:15 pm
Conference Schedule
8:30 - Coffee and light Breakfast items available
I.
9:00-10:15 – First Session
Markku Peltonen, ‘Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and the Causes of the English Civil War’
Commentator: Kinch Hoekstra
Chair: Heikki Haara
Coffee Break: 10:15-10:30
II.
10:30-11:45—Second Session
Richard Serjeantson, ‘Francis Bacon, Colonies, and the Limits of Atlanticism’
Commentator: Jonathan Sheehan
Chair: Victoria Kahn
Lunch 11:45 – 12:45
III.
12:45—2pm—Third Session
Kathryn Murphy, ‘The Lord Chancellor’s Foot: Objectivity, Impartiality, and Equity in
Baconian Legal and Natural Philosophy’
Commentator: Ethan Shagan
Chair: Kinch Hoekstra
Break 2:00-2:15
IV.
2:15-3:45—Fourth Session
Daniel Lee, ‘Legal Science and Legal Reform in the Juridical Thought of Sir Francis Bacon’
Commentator: Barbara Shapiro
Chair: Sam Zeitlin
Break 3:45-4:00
V.
4:00-5:15—Fifth Session
Annabel Brett, ‘Is there Any Environmental or Ecological Thinking in 16th- and 17th-century
Political Thought?’
Commentator: Diego Pirillo
Chair: Shannon Stimson
Politics, Nature, and the Imagination in the Work of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Paper Abstracts
Dr. Annabel Brett (Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge), ‘Is there any
environmental or ecological thinking in 16th- and 17th-century political thought?’
On the face of it, the major idioms of 16th- and 17th-century political thought (natural law, ‘republicanism’,
reason of state…) do not seem to offer any very fertile ground for an historian of environmental or ecological
political thought, preoccupied as they are with relations between human beings. Moreover, the period
generally is hardly known for its sensitivity in this respect, with technological change, colonial activities and
the ‘scientific revolution’ itself being associated with control and domination of nature rather than respect for
its operation or agency. Francis Bacon figures as a decided culprit in this story. The aim of this paper is not to
rehabilitate him in these terms, at least not directly, but rather to ask whether 16th- and 17th-century political
thought is always antithetical to any kind of environmental or ecological political thinking. That is, whether
the way they think of nature, of human agency and of human political structures excludes any idea of human
co-existence or co-operation with the natural world such as to generate any moral, political or juridical claim
or limitation upon human activity. After a necessarily broad-brushed and schematic survey, it concludes that
while we can scarcely view this period as a great age of environmental or ecological political thinking, it is not
altogether devoid of interest from that perspective.
Professor Daniel Lee (University of Toronto), ‘Legal science and legal reform in the juridical
thought of Sir Francis Bacon’
This paper considers Bacon's theory of legal reform and will tie together some of his views on Roman law
and early modern continental legal science in Bacon’s understanding of equity jurisdiction and the role of the
Crown in making and re-making English law. This paper is particularly interested in exploring the
comparison that Bacon makes between the Emperor Justinian's role in compiling the Corpus Iuris Civilis and
the role of the Stuart Monarchy in reforming the common law. Bacon was not alone in this view
in early modern England, thus this paper aims to tie Bacon’s view of common law reform to recent work on
the English Civilians of Bacon’s period who had similar ambitions for common law reform in a Romanist
direction.
Dr. Katherine Murphy (Oriel College, University of Oxford), ‘The Lord Chancellor's Foot:
Objectivity, Impartiality, and Equity in Baconian Legal and Natural Philosophy’
Baconian natural philosophy has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention for its supposed role in the
emergence of the modern notion of objectivity. Lorraine Daston, in the most substantial monograph on the
subject, called Bacon objectivity's ‘patron saint’; in studies by Julie Robin Solomon, Stephen Gaukroger, Perez
Zagorin, and Sorana Corneanu, among others, Bacon is either the primary focus or the crucial ancestor in the
development of a concept which is seen as constitutive not just of modern science, but of public discourse
and conduct. This paper argues that the retrojection of a modern notion of objectivity onto Bacon's
epistemology and natural philosophy has obscured both its proper contexts, and its idiosyncrasy. Rather,
Bacon's legal writings and his account of the propensity of the mind to error in the investigation of nature,
from the earliest works to the Instauratio magna, share a language of impartiality and equity. In exploring this
language against the backdrop of the early modern theory of equity, and Bacon's professional life and
writings, this paper will both show ways in which his legal and political practice sheds light on his natural
philosophy, and suggest new avenues in considering the vexed question of the emergence of objectivity.
Professor Markku Peltonen (University of Helsinki/Academy of Finland) ‘Francis Bacon, Thomas
Hobbes and the causes of the English Civil War’
The paper uses Thomas Hobbes’s famous argument that the English Civil War was caused by the classical
education of humanist schoolmasters as its starting point, and begins by placing Hobbes’s account into its
intellectual and historical context. It will then explore Bacon’s views of classical education, rhetoric and
politics as part of the same context.
Dr. Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, University of Cambridge), ‘Francis Bacon, Colonies, and
the Limits of Atlanticism’
This paper offers a thesis about one of Francis Bacon’s most persistent political preoccupations: the question
of colonial expansion. Bacon was led to consider this question by a number of different developments: by the
Union of the English and Scottish crowns; by the ongoing English (and Scottish) conquest of Ireland; by the
founding and operation of the Virginia Company; and by his reading of theoretical literature on the subject of
colonisation, above all perhaps that by Giovanni Botero. Bacon's preoccupation with colonies appears in
passing in certain of his legal arguments and private memoranda. More obviously, it helped generate several
of his own writings: his widely-circulated manuscript ‘Considerations on the Queen’s Service in Ireland’,
addressed to Cecil (1602); his unfinished manuscript treatise (here re-dated to c. 1608) on the ‘True Greatness
of Britain’; his position-paper for King James and Privy Council on the planned Plantation in County Tyrone
(1609); and his well-known essay ‘Of Plantations’ (1625). Since the remarkable work of D. B. Quinn over half
a century ago the general tendency in the historiography of early British imperial political thought
(reemphasised in more recent studies by scholars such as Armitage and Fitzmaurice) has been to emphasise
its urge towards the West: reaching via Ireland towards the precarious colonies of the eastern seaboard of
North America. My paper proposes a corrective to this familiar Atlanticist story, by offering some different
suggestions about the directions in which Bacon’s Roman and Spanish political perspectives—and ultimately,
too, his natural philosophical commitments—in fact led his colonial vision.
Politics, Nature, and the Imagination in the Work of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Brief Biographies of the Presenters
Annabel Brett is Reader in the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge. Her principal
research interests lie in late medieval and early modern political thought, with a focus on the history of natural
law and natural rights language and political Aristotelianism. She is the author of Liberty, right and nature.
Individual rights in later scholastic thought (1997), a new translation of Marsilius of Padua's The defender of the peace
(2006) and most recently Changes of state. Nature and the limits of the city in early modern natural law (2011).
Daniel Lee (Ph.D. Princeton) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and
specializes in political theory and the history of political thought. His current research concerns the reception
of Roman legal science in early modern political thought, especially in the thought of Jean Bodin. His
recent research has been published in Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Thought, and Political Theory,
and he is preparing a study on the Roman law origins of the modern constitutional doctrine of popular
sovereignty.
Kathryn Murphy is Fellow and Tutor in English at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her research
focuses on seventeenth-century prose and poetry, and its relationship to philosophy and theology. She has
published various articles on Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Thomas Traherne, and Robert Burton, and is
co-editor of the collected volumes A Man Very Well-Studyed: New Contexts for Thomas Browne, with Richard
Todd (Leiden, 2008), and The Emergence of Impartiality, with Anita Traninger (Leiden, 2013). She is editing
volumes of the Oxford Francis Bacon (Sylva Sylvarum) and the Oxford Thomas Browne (Urne-Buriall and The
Garden of Cyrus). Other current projects include completing a monograph entitled The Tottering Universal:
Knowledge and Experience in Early Modern Prose, and editing the Penguin Book of Renaissance Prose.
Markku Peltonen holds the Chair in General History at the University of Helsinki (chair founded in 1640)
and is currently an Academic Professor at the Academy of Finland. His publications include Classical
Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995) and The Duel in Early
Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge, 2003). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Bacon
(Cambridge, 1996).
Richard Serjeantson is a Fellow and Lecturer in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he teaches the
history of political thought and the history of the sciences. He has published a number of studies of Francis
Bacon, including ‘Natural knowledge in the New Atlantis’, in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, ed. Bronwen Price
(Manchester, 2002) and [with T. A. Woolford] ‘The Scribal Publication of a Printed Book’, The Library, 10
(2009). The present paper arises from his work as editor (with Dr Angus Vine) of Bacon’s earlier Jacobean
writings for the Oxford Francis Bacon, a new edition of Bacon's complete works, inaugurated by the late
Graham Rees, and issued by the Clarendon Press (1996– ).